> some cryptos like Tezos are governed quite decentralized in many ways.

Whenever crypto enthusiasts tell me about DeFi governance, I get excited about the possibilities.

Then, I actually take a look at some of the group decisions, and literally all of them are crypto/coin-related, and don’t deal with any /real/ or human problems…

I'd recommend looking at Project Catalyst out of the Cardano ecosystem.

Of course the proposals are still heavily focused on internal/ecosystem development but there's an increasing focus on building platforms for people in developing regions as well. There has generally been a heavy focus on improving connectivity and access to affordable financial services within the African continent however recently there's been slowly growing focus on other regions with large unbanked or under-banked populations.

With the amount of money that is allotted via the treasury for the Cardano ecosystem, Catalyst (and eventually proper on-chain governance when it evolves into that) has funding to comfortably run it's 6 week cadence funding rounds indefinitely at a rate of 15 million USD per round once it finished scaling up. As the network grows the scale will likely increase but regardless I think with the focuses the community has (particularly thanks to West Africa Decentralised Alliance) we'll see increasing focus on improving infrastructure and access in developing regions.

And while you could argue that many of the solutions proposed have some net positive effect flowing back to the ecosystem, generally the focus has been on connecting people rather than driving traffic to the network.

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Sorry if that got a little long winded. It's a cool project+community and we've been working really hard to avoid the toxic coin maximalist & self-centred behaviour that's become so incredibly common in the space.

Come on. I wish ADA well, but Charles is one self-centered person and the community has erected a cult around him and is super toxic against other projects. After BTC maxis, ADA has the most religious maximalists I would say.

As someone who started learning about Cardano recently and has listened to some of Charles' broadcasts on YouTube, I'm not really sure what you're referring to. To me he seems happy to celebrate success in other crypto platforms, has some strong opinions and a libertarian bent, but of course is building Cardano according to his own vision.

BTC maximalists are quasi-religious in my experience but Cardano just seems to recognize the inevitable ascension of the blockchain and is building for that future, very similar to Ethereum.

Maybe he's full of it; I've encountered other comments criticizing him but none that were deifying.

I agree that Charles is self-centred and that there is a cult of personality around him to a certain degree but it really depends on which part of the community you are in as to whether it's "this is an influential person in the space so let's listen" or "our god king is speaking".

The Project Catalyst community, the official IOG developer discord, and even the Cardano subreddits (r/Cardano, r/Cardano_ELI5, r/CardanoDevelopers, etc) to a less extent aren't caught up in this cult mentality so much. When Charles says something stupid, innapropriate, or unbecoming, people are not afraid to address it in these spaces. On r/CryptoCurrency or on twitter it's a different story but Twitter is a cesspool (especially for any cryptocurrency) and while we try to call out the zealots on r/CC, it's not particularly easy.

In those dedicated Cardano spaces though, there is a marked effort to avoid the cult mentality and redirect that energy towards focusing on actual projects.

Very few people (in these communities) have the belief that somehow Cardano is going to be the dominant cryptocurrency or is going to "take over the world" so to speak. There is a strong belief that the project will be successful and a strong ecosystem is forming around it but not that it renders other chains irrelevant or that it must grow at any cost including via the minimisation or attacking of other networks. The general consensus is that it will make a strong showing and settle into a reasonably solid position in the greater financial ecosystem where it'll be intertwined with and coexisting with legacy financial systems and the other major cryptocurrency networks.

TLDR: Every topic/space has zealots unfortunately but looking at their core communities I've found Cardano to be generally fairly resistant to this behaviour. It's not a perfect community by any means but out of all the communities I'm involved in, I've seen more people in the Cardano ecosystem go out of their way to walk others away from maximalist behaviour or zealotry than any other community. I've been around for quite a while and I've seen how the different communities have evolved so I like to believe I've gotten a reasonably comprehensive view of the communities but no person can see everything and in the end this is all anecdotal experiences.

> I'd recommend looking at Project Catalyst out of the Cardano ecosystem.

Could you maybe provide some examples of these /real/ problems they want to focus on? No DYOR, since you seem to be actually involved in the project.

Providing banking services for under-banked regions is yet again, for the crypto. Avoiding KYC is not a feature; I would argue that developing countries need robust infrastructure that incorporates societal laws, for positive outcomes.

Fair request. I'll pull the ones off the top of my head.

Catalyst just recently funded a proposal for a decentralised pharmaceuticals project that is initially basing out of Southern(?) African nations (primarily SA atm I believe). Initially I believe it is focused on aggregating the information and technology necessary for some common life saving medications. The end goal is to provide easy access to process knowledge so as to reduce the barriers of entry for local organisations to start (or improve) production of and access to medications. This project is definitely a bit of a long shot and it'll need more funding than what it got so far but provided their regular reporting looks good, odds are they'll be able to come back for additional funding rounds until they can ramp up to a sustainable model. IDK if it'll work but I wish them the best.

Another proposal was funded to attempt rolling out food traceability solutions in I think Western Africa to help farmers get easier access to global markets (rather than being stuck selling to a megacorp that then resells for much higher).

Additionally, the next funding round has a category dedicated to projects that are focused on micro-finance on the African continent (think Kiva loans) which has the potential to significantly improve the lives of farmers and people starting small businesses.

I would go into the other Project Catalyst projects more but Catalyst is still in it's early stages (scaling up is happening but it won't be at 100% until the end of the year) so there aren't a tonne of funded projects overall yet. There were some other projects that didn't get funded but they generally had issues that need to be resolved before they are really even worth discussing. We are still ironing out some of the issues with the whole process so it's been a bit of a bumpy road so far.

Also of note is World Mobile. They are in the same space and are rolling out a decentralised ISP network in Tanzania focused on providing at least basic wifi connectivity to rural villages.

Of course all of these projects are generally aiming to produce some kind of income at the end of the day but that's not inherently a bad thing as it promotes making the projects sustainable (rather than relying on outside funding). Additionally one of the goals with these projects is to try and jump start or otherwise stimulate the economies they are targetting so approaching from a business approach rather than a purely altruistic approach could potentially yield better results.

Also they all generally use cryptocurrency/decentralised tech in some capacity but it's not like the cryptocurrency itself is the focus. The community has a cryptocurrency focus so it's common to see people approach the solutions from that perspective.

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> I would argue that developing countries need robust infrastructure that incorporates societal laws, for positive outcomes.

I agree and generally that's been the consensus in the community as well. The overwhelming theme has been to try and be as non-disruptive (in a negative sense) as possible. Progress is slow if it's to be successful in most cases and the last thing you want to do is to cause upset in the local communities. As an anecdote, at least in the Catalyst community all the projects I've seen that are "boots on the ground" type projects have had a strong focus on doing things by the books and not accidentally stepping on any toes along the way.

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I hope that addresses everything. If you have any questions let me know. I'm a bit strapped on time so I may not be on HN for a day or two but I'll eventually be around and I'll respond when I can.

"decentralised pharmaceuticals project that is initially basing out of"

This sound like a worthwhile project which could be run by a group of passionate supporters. Why does it need a blockchain?

The primary usage of the network will be to provided a funding and governance mechanism for open source research and drug discovery.

It's mostly just a convenient and transparent way to fund R&D as well as to allow supporters/participants a controlling voice in the operation of the organisation.

Here's a link to their proposal. You may have to create an ideascale account to access it but if that's the case and you don't want to do that, let me know and I can mirror it over in a comment here.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Africa-Opensource-Pharma...

Thanks for that comment, looks like a really interesting project, I'll read more about it!

Tezos for example has the problem of missing liquidity. So they voted for protocol level liquidity called liquidity baking. A little bit of inflation is used to incentivise liquidity providing. It's an experiment but it shows the power of governance. See https://liquidity-baking.com/ for current liquidity.

For sure it will always be voted on something that is good for the chain or for the token. When its good publicity for a chain to vote for charity-baking you could solve human problems.

Maybe take a look at Proof of Humanity? proofofhumanity.id. Real world problem (poverty) being tackled by crypto via a DAO. Very early days yet, but fascinating to watch as it evolves.

“Proof of Humanity, a system combining webs of trust, with reverse Turing tests, and dispute resolution to create a sybil-proof list of humans.”

This is their mission, and the rest of the website focuses on ID and such services. Not one mention of poverty alleviation.

The connection here is that sybil-proofing is a (the?) major bottleneck to cryptoeconomic UBI schemes.

That’s like saying SSN (or other gov issued ID) solves poverty.

Some people believe that government issued ID in conjunction with a government that implemented a UBI scheme would indeed improve poverty. Andrew Yang wrote a reasonable book about the idea.

sybil-proofing in blockchain systems opens the possibility for any person or community to take a shot at implementing UBI. Could someone succeed in creating a token that retains some level of value long term and also consistently tops up at some rate in everyone's wallet? Beats me. But sybil-proofing is absolutely blocking issue on that front.

Are you serious?

I am serious that it is straightforward to create a token where everyone on earth gets X/day in a sybil proof system.

Making this token retain some sort of value is of course an entirely different problem, and I don't have strong opinions on whether someone might pull it off.

Yes.

Well you have uniswap's vote on the educational fund. Which IIRC was about allocating money to lobby for crypto.

https://app.uniswap.org/#/vote/1/1

Yes, so you’re proving my point? Sure, it’s about lobbying, but in defense of crypto (Previously known as: DeFi Political Defense Fund), to keep their crypto ball rolling.

yes, indeed. I just thought this case is slightly different, they chose to go out and do politics (true, over crypto nonetheless). But I feel that normally, all the proposals are about the protocol itself, changes rates, etc and this case it's about interacting with other humans.

Fair enough, I agree there is somewhat of a difference.

How would you change that?

> (b) is why Bitcoin core development has stagnated. And that's fine if people just want it to be like gold, however Ethereum doesn't aspire to not evolve.

How stagnated is Bitcoin development? Yeah it is not progressing super fast, but I think it is still progressing. Taproot has been accepted by miners and will be activated this year. Improvements are being done.

As Bitcoin is the biggest crypto by market gap, I think risk-aversiveness is a good thing. While I was initially a big blocker, now I think that going without a hard fork was probably quite a good idea. Bitcoin still works nicely and I still use it a lot, now I just use LN transactions in addition to onchain txes.

I just find it unbelievable that after a decade of the smartest people moving into the crypto space, the best crypto solution is the first one, created by a single person 13 years ago.

It makes Bitcoin look like an anti-technology.

True, Taproot is looking promising. Yet, it's the only major change since 2017, I don't think they're moving fast enough.

And what's the next major improvement on the cards for Bitcoin after Taproot? I haven't heard much, and that is worrying in and of itself IMO.

I'm not sure we should treat the base money of the internet the same way we do tech startups - to "move fast and break things". I would like to know that my BTC is stored in a network backed by code that is secure with slow and steady progress.

There's certainly a good middle ground between moving slowly and moving quickly, I think Ethereum has found that middle ground.

Half of this article is complaints about how Ethereum is moving too slowly with the PoS transition. They're certainly not of the "move fast and break things" mindset.

eth feels like wild west of script kiddies writing javascript to manage billions of USD. far from being middle ground, it's quite the opposite of btc's "let's not ruin the foundation even if we'll be called unnecessarily conservative" stance.

in fact, i would even argue that btc's stance is closer to middle ground as they are clearly working towards making it easier to run all sorts of wild experiments in the upper layers while protecting and minimizing what's going on in the base layer.

> the base money of the internet

You can't. Be serious.

What percentage of internet transactions are performed in Bitcoin? 1%? 0.1%?

Way less than that.

how about trying to be more charitable with your interpretations? the statement you're quoting isn't necessarily factual but aspirational.

I agree. Bitcoin is a better store of value, Ethereum is a better tech stack for innovation. They serve different purposes and so should have different development schedules and risk aversion.

At its core, a store of value is just something that other people will desire as much now as they do at some later point in time. In that sense, Bitcoin runs the risk of being left behind if PoW at 7tx/sec becomes seen as the dial-up modem of crypto.

A store of value is a meaningless term. Value can't be stored. Stuff can be stored. And no assurances can be made as to whether stuff will keep its value over time. Anyone who does that is a charlatan.

https://bitcoinops.org/. bitcoin is far from stagnant, there's a ton of research and development going on, it's just not being treated as "move fast and break things" kind of project.

it is really sad state of affairs when you only consider something as not stagnant when it's constantly putting people's money at tremendous risk.

at least the market seems to understand it.

Decentralized governance is interesting like nuclear fusion: it's 30 years away and always will be. Real governance requires somebody to take the time and effort to think about solutions to public goods problems. In other words, governance is a public good. Decentralizing it just results in underprovision.

Except nuclear fusion isn't 30 years away anymore. A ton of progress has been made in plasma physics. There's a good chance we'll see an energy-positive reactor by the end of this decade.

HB11?

Also SPARC, ITER, whatever Lockheed is working on, and probably others.

> Decentralized governance

Do you mean voting? Has been around since ancient Greece.

I do not. Direct democracy, as practiced by Athens, would be a better example. Worked OK for Athens for a while. Athens had probably 30,000 citizens. No modern state has tried replacing representative democracy with direct democracy, for reasons nicely explained by Benjamin Constant (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/constant-the-liberty-of-a...).